Four of the most interesting search marketing news stories of the week

It’s Friday, so welcome to our weekly round up of search marketing and related news.

This week we have the 16 companies dominating Google, stats on retailers’ search budgets, and a look at accusations around Google and searches for Hillary Clinton.

Is Google manipulating searches for Hillary Clinton? Er,no…

There’s been talk of Google manipulating autocomplete suggestions for searches on Hillary Clinton. A video from SourceFed claims that searches around Clinton are being manipulated as they don’t return the suggestions they would expect to find.

SEO and reputation management expert Rhea Drysdale does an excellent job of debunking the theory in a post on Medium.

Essentially SourceFed failed to compare similar searches for Donald Trump, which fail to suggest phrases like “Donald Trump lawsuit”.

In a nutshell, if Google is manipulating searches for Clinton, it’s doing the same for Trump. There’s another theory too – the popularity of the SourceFed video has led to thousands trying out these searches for themselves, thus potentially manipulating these results.

Google becomes the world’s most powerful brand

Apple’s value has dropped 8% to $228 billion in the past year, while Google’s has risen 32% to reach $229 billion. So Google takes top spot in Millward Brown Digital’s annual report.

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.